I just saw the most insane lightning storm here in Toronto. I went out on the balcony and it was incredibly near by — I watched it hitting the lake, not more than a few hundred feet out from shore. I stood on the balcony of our 27th story apartment and felt the electricity come closer and closer. Suddenly a bolt of lightning arced past in front of my face, less than fifty feet from me. I could feel the charge move past me, my nerves tingled, and the ear-shattering thunder instantly struck me. At that moment the sky opened up and a flood of water was on my cheeks — I was nearly expecting the Four Horsemen to ride out of the heavens at me. Below is a photo of the sky lit by lightning:
Anyway… I have to be up in two hours so I'm going to go watch The Daily Show and go to bed.
Well, it's a lot later than I'd hoped but a nice big image update with over 2,500 new images which gets me caught up to submissions as of Monday morning is posted. I hope it went smoothly and stuff isn't damaged anywhere; as you may know I've had a number of emergencies delay my work to past the midnight line, which the updating software wasn't designed for (thus some manual overrides). In any case, enjoy the update and thank you to everyone who helped and to bloody kim for the cover photo of her and nurse betty.
One of the diversions today was a three or four hour stint at the hospital. I do not like going to the hospital at all… I try and stay as healthy as I can so I don't have to. Hospital are cesspools of illness and despair, and to be honest I don't really trust doctors very much at all. I've talked here about my misadventures with incompetent psychiatric diagnosis, but let me tell you a story from my youth.
This story involves testicles, so stop reading now if you have a problem with that.
I don't know exactly how old I was but I was pretty young and I think not far into puberty. Anyway, I started to notice that my balls were kind of big, or at least they seemed like it to me. My parents had books in our library about anatomy and sexuality, so I knew that one was fairly normal but I didn't really know whether the other one was. It seemed too big. As time went by it grew large enough that I was upset about it (hey, I was a kid and I thought something was going terribly wrong with me).
I summoned up the courage to get over the shame of having to ask my parents to take me to a doctor's appointment for it. My friendly South African doctor (and bush pilot) thought it might be a hydrocele (which is where fluid builds up inside the “skin” of the testicle causing it to swell) so we went across the street to the hospital to see their urologist. He promised me it wouldn't hurt a bit, and, without any anesthetic he took a big 100cc syringe with a 16ga needle on it and rammed it deep into my right testicle. Strangely, I can't remember any pain from the skewering, but when he pulled the plunger to draw off the hydrocele all I felt was a dull ache and no fluid came out.
“It doesn't look like you have a hydrocele… We're not entirely sure what it is though. It could be a tumor, so we'll have to do exploratory surgery. It's the only way to know.”
Exploratory surgery on my balls, great.
On the morning of the surgery, they explained to me that they were going to be cutting open my scrotum and would be doing some kind of vivisection on the testicle to try and figure out what was wrong with it. They also let me know that when I came out of the anesthesia I might have a silicone “falsie” if they had to amputate. This didn't bother me, so I signed their release forms and within the hour I was counting backward from ten and drifting into unconsciousness.
When I woke up in the recovery room, I still had both my nuts, and the doctors sheepishly explained, “turns out you've just got big balls, sorry about all the fuss.” (If you're wondering the obvious, no, Canada is not a litigous country). Ever since then I've never really trusted doctors very much.
It might however explain BME/HARD.
